Automated Transcript
Ivan:
[0:00]
| Okay, one more time with feeling. Hello?
|
Sam:
[0:03]
| One more time with feeling. Can you hear me?
|
Ivan:
[0:05]
| Yes. Okay.
|
Sam:
[0:07]
| And I can hear you. Good, good, good, good. Why hasn't this gone up? There we go. Okay, put that out. Put that out. Bloom. Okay.
|
Ivan:
[0:25]
| Oh, yeah, that sounds wonderful.
|
Sam:
[0:28]
| I try. I try hard. Okay, are we ready? Shall we begin? And hope for the best. Oh, Jesus Christ. I just accidentally zoomed in and the whole screen got big.
|
Ivan:
[0:43]
| I did that a couple of times as well. I'd never done that before. I'm like, all of a sudden, yo! I'm like, wait, no, that's too close.
|
Sam:
[0:51]
| Okay, here we go. Welcome to Curmudgeon's Corner for Saturday, December 6th, 2025. It's just after 17 UTC as we're starting to record. I'm Sam and J. Yvonne Bowes here. Hello, Yvonne.
|
Ivan:
[1:29]
| Hello!
|
Sam:
[1:31]
| Now, one thing before we get started, and I meant to do the prep for this, but I completely forgot until literally this very second, so I haven't done it yet, which is we are now in December, which means we are rapidly approaching our end-of-the-year special shows. The last show of the year is going to be predictions for 2026, and the first show of next year is going to be review of our predictions that we made a year ago for 2025.
|
Sam:
[2:05]
| Now, as I've done the last few years, I'm going to put up a Google Doc that has some basic categories and invite our listeners to start dropping in things they want us to do predictions on. Now, you know, like I said, I haven't prepped the Google Doc yet, but this is heads up to start thinking about it. And I promise you for next week, I will have a link to that Google Doc. For anybody who remembers previous years, it's probably going to be the same URL as last year, but with 2025 changed to 2026. But I haven't set it up yet. And yeah so start thinking about it start thinking about things you would like us to predict we of course have things we we always like tend to include anyway but pain but we are look looking for suggestions from people and things you want us to predict and uh we predicted pain for.
|
Ivan:
[3:01]
| This here i'm sure and i i'm pretty sure i was right.
|
Sam:
[3:04]
| You you generally predict pain and you generally predict that Fidel Castro will die.
|
Ivan:
[3:11]
| Yes, I'm consistent.
|
Sam:
[3:14]
| Even though he's died many years ago.
|
Ivan:
[3:18]
| Well, I, yeah, well.
|
Sam:
[3:20]
| Some, you've sometimes gotten it right and sometimes wrong because sometimes you predict that he will die and sometimes you predict that he will be dead and those are different.
|
Ivan:
[3:30]
| Those are different. Right.
|
Sam:
[3:33]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[3:33]
| You know, I, I agree. Those are different. Okay. I don't think that if I predict he will die again this year, I could be a next year. I will be correct. Or if I did that, I got to check back on the logs to see what I predicted. But, yes, that tends to be accurate. I will say that my prediction for pain for this year was probably quite accurate. I don't think that if anybody goes and describes 2025 and doesn't include the word pain, I, you know.
|
Sam:
[4:01]
| That is one of your pretty safe predictions. Did you?
|
Ivan:
[4:05]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[4:06]
| I will say. Yes.
|
Ivan:
[4:07]
| And this year it was more accurate than others.
|
Sam:
[4:11]
| Yes anyway so other than that we're going to do our usual thing with less newsy stuff in the first segment and then moving on to more newsy stuff as we go of.
|
Ivan:
[4:20]
| Course i would be remiss to point out that it.
|
Sam:
[4:23]
| Didn't seem.
|
Ivan:
[4:24]
| That until until this year when i shared a video clip from.
|
Sam:
[4:31]
| Yes, I did not know where the pain thing was from. Yes, I had no idea that it was from something.
|
Ivan:
[4:39]
| You had no idea of where that came from.
|
Sam:
[4:42]
| Yeah, no, I had not the slightest clue. And then suddenly it was revealed to me. But yeah, I just thought that was a thing you did. I had no idea it was from something.
|
Ivan:
[4:53]
| Yeah, no, it was, you know, I wasn't that original. I mean, I have some original ones, but not that one. it was you know i i guess have you watched the rocky movies.
|
Sam:
[5:04]
| I i have only ever seen and we are we we recently it must be one of.
|
Ivan:
[5:09]
| Them had to be on.
|
Sam:
[5:10]
| The afi list rocky the original rocky was on the afi list and i think i'd seen it before but i did actually recently like within the last couple months re-watch it with alex i'm not ready to review it on the show yet because i'm going in order but okay but i have only ever seen the original rocky none of the none of.
|
Ivan:
[5:32]
| The sequels okay.
|
Sam:
[5:33]
| None of the sequels and there's a lot of sequels since i've now watched the first one they will now be on the list to eventually get to them including like they're still releasing these damn things right i mean now they're releasing new whatever but yeah that is so So they.
|
Ivan:
[5:49]
| Are still absolutely releasing these. But this, that was from Rocky three. Rocky three was, uh.
|
Sam:
[5:58]
| The one with Mr. T.
|
Ivan:
[5:59]
| Mr. T. Yeah. It was, I think it was an 82 that it was out. Something like that. I, uh, I'm, I'm, I'm, let me see. Uh, when was it released? Uh, let's see. Uh, why am I, I'm, I am slow. Here we go. Uh, it was released. Yeah, I was right. 82. So it's been a while. So, yeah, and that was what Mr. T played a guy, a guy named Clubber Lang. And he was asked at some point, like, you know, he was being interviewed and he was asked, predictions, what are your predictions? And he looks at the camera all angry as a Mr. T look. Pain.
|
Sam:
[6:42]
| Right. Yes. Anyway, so I am going to work on trying to catch up with my movie list and do two of those today. But in the meantime, Yvonne, what's your non-newsy, less serious thing to start off the show with?
|
Ivan:
[6:58]
| My non-newsy, less serious thing to start the show off with? What the hell? What happened this week? I don't even remember. What was I doing?
|
Sam:
[7:10]
| Our list is very sparse this week, like, of things that we've noted.
|
Ivan:
[7:16]
| Well, I had a very busy, well, I was, like, busy, but it wasn't, it was a, the type of busy is a different type of busy. What happened is my wife this week has been working elections. There's been a local, my wife regularly works elections. There was a local, I think it's state representative election that that off cycle because somebody died or something, whatever. And they were she was being replaced, not for our district. And she's they they do early voting for those. And she's she's been doing early voting, you know, for this election, you know, at the site. And so, so she's been out of the house all day because it's, she started working at last Saturday and she's been there every day.
|
Ivan:
[8:10]
| She's had to get there at, to the polls, bowling station, like leave the house at seven 30 in the morning and she's not getting home until eight o'clock. So I've been having to take mine into school, pick him up from school, take him to basketball, take him to tutoring, take him to here. So I have been like, you know, quite. You know, and doing my job. Okay. You know, because some of us have a job still and, you know, and so I, I've been, you know, I've been doing both at the same time. So it's just, I feel like I've just been running around back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Um, and then one of the things that I was trying to solve this week is something that I did not expect that the time I spent in the 80s programming COBOL would be useful.
|
Sam:
[8:59]
| So you were doing COBOL this week?
|
Ivan:
[9:01]
| I had to do something related to COBOL this week, okay? And I didn't realize that the time that I spent programming in COBOL would be useful right now in my career.
|
Sam:
[9:17]
| So you weren't actually programming COBOL this week.
|
Ivan:
[9:19]
| I wasn't, but I was resolving. issue with it. The thing is, I remember when I coded in Cobalt, it's the only language that I have used that I... A lot of, you know, a lot of, like, basic is running a real-time compiler.
|
Sam:
[9:40]
| Okay?
|
Ivan:
[9:40]
| You're not...
|
Sam:
[9:41]
| Usually.
|
Ivan:
[9:42]
| Yeah, usually. So you write the code, and you have it, and you run it, and it's being compiled in real-time. But COBOL, you compile, you take the code, you modify it, you compile it, and then you run it, okay? So if you are making changes, you go and you rewrite some code, you have to recompile it first before you run it. And then that compiled code is the one that's run. And usually, you know, for every platform, you have to have a compiler, you know, like I remember that I was using back then Ryan McFarlane Cobol. And I had to, I was running it on Xenix, you know? And so the first thing I ever did, I mean, the only code that I ever worked on in it was for a payroll program that was written for another hardware platform. But in order to run it on the hardware that we had, first, we had to make some changes to it. The second thing was that we had to recompile it for the hardware that we were running, okay? Otherwise it wouldn't run. And you have to have the right compiler. And if you didn't have the compiler, you know, so anyway.
|
Ivan:
[11:01]
| I have a customer that has PeopleSoft. Now, PeopleSoft that I knew, that I knew, is not written in COBOL. It's a newer application. But I came to discover and find out. Because, you know, the only time I ever used PeopleSoft before was that we had the company at HP, we used PeopleSoft for. We had replaced our old ERP that we had for the old HR system, which was written in, like, whatever legacy system it was. We have people so right but that's the only time i ever really used it but company i work with does sell they owned it and so there's a customer that has it and all of a sudden, people called me for a project and said hey we need a cobalt compiler and i'm like wait what what do you mean for what i did not realize and learned over the last recent time that apparently everything that is batch processed in people soft is actually run in cobalt i have no idea of that okay okay, And so, I mean.
|
Sam:
[12:09]
| I mean, it's well known that COBOL is still in use in all kinds of legacy things, but it's kind of surprising whenever you find out it's in use for something that you consider sort of an up to date modern thing that is right. You know, as opposed to something that's been running in a closet for 40 years, you know, exactly.
|
Ivan:
[12:26]
| And that was surprising. Now, the application itself is not. But what I've come to find out is that, hey, there are certain things that if you want to run batches, you want to do things, you want to code something, you want to do some customization, it's written in COBOL. And so I had to go and I got on a conference call where I realized that the only guy on the call that had, you know, we're talking about, well, how many users do you really need for to buy a compiler license? And I realized, well, I've actually done this. And the reality is that all you probably need is one because you just sit one. You're going to have to have one licensed guy who's going to be sitting over there. And anything that's changed, he will be the guy who will be doing the compiling for that code to go and send that. Then put in the system and run. But we don't really, not everybody needs one. And so I, I got on a call where there were like about 10 or 15 people and I happened to be the only guy that had ever compiled anything in Cobalt Sound. And that makes me feel quite old.
|
Sam:
[13:47]
| Full of fucking things. Yeah, well, I mean.
|
Ivan:
[13:52]
| Shit, I am, I mean, if, you know, if that doesn't date me, I don't know what the fuck does.
|
Sam:
[14:00]
| That is certainly an option. Next thing you'll be talking punch cards.
|
Ivan:
[14:07]
| You know, I never used punch cards, but, you know, did do a lot of the of the the the cards where you filled out the data by by filling, you know, you answered the little bubbles and then use the, you know, then fed them into the IBM mainframe, you know, the to to to to test run test scores or whatever using those that those.
|
Sam:
[14:33]
| I don't think I ever actually used a punch card for anything real. I remember I had a punch card with like my name punched in it or whatever.
|
Ivan:
[14:42]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[14:42]
| And I'm pretty sure my dad, at least one point in time, actually did use punch cards for actually like something real. So, but you know. Anyway, so, okay, you used COBOL. Anything else you got?
|
Ivan:
[14:59]
| My knowledge, my first-hand knowledge of using COBOL was actually useful in an actual business situation today in 2025.
|
Sam:
[15:18]
| I'm amazed. I'm amazed.
|
Ivan:
[15:21]
| Amazed is not the right word. But yes, it does definitely show that, fuck, I'm old.
|
Sam:
[15:29]
| So before we move on to my movies, and because you mentioned you're old, your recovery continuing the pace, you look like you feel good today.
|
Ivan:
[15:38]
| I feel pretty good. I am feeling pretty good. So it's definitely a pace. We are now in week four, day, what, one or two around there of it. It's definitely feeling well. They said six weeks. It's coming along. Yeah. Yeah. So it's feeling good so far.
|
Sam:
[16:05]
| Excellent. So I'm going to bang out two movies.
|
Ivan:
[16:10]
| Bang out two movies. Let's bang on the movies. Okay. All right. Let's see.
|
Sam:
[16:15]
| What do we got for movies? So first of all, I will have to issue a correction for a number of weeks ago when I talked about the movie Godzilla versus King Kong. A few when.
|
Ivan:
[16:29]
| Was that what what was that out what year is this movie.
|
Sam:
[16:33]
| When did godzilla versus kim king kong come out yeah okay i i will tell you that is not the one i'm gonna be talking about but let me get the list up godzilla versus kong king kong versus godzilla let me get the title right was 1962 so.
|
Ivan:
[16:51]
| That was the 62 one but then they do a modern remake of that.
|
Sam:
[16:54]
| There there were There was Godzilla vs. Kong in 2021 and Godzilla X-Kong, The New Empire in 2024.
|
Ivan:
[17:06]
| I, I, okay.
|
Sam:
[17:08]
| And by the way, upcoming Godzilla X-Kong Supernova in 2027.
|
Ivan:
[17:14]
| Well, I am maintaining my perfect streak of not having watched any of them.
|
Sam:
[17:19]
| So I am not talking about any of those modern ones. What i said wrong when i talked about godzilla versus or sorry king kong versus godzilla on the show earlier was i had said that you know we were working our way through both the godzilla and the king kong movies and you know we had and i forgot which one we'd hit king kong versus Godzilla in order in, and I thought maybe it was the Godzilla movies, I was wrong. I, in fact, had not yet started the Godzilla movies when we watched King Kong versus Godzilla. I had been working my way through the King Kong movies.
|
Ivan:
[18:02]
| But not any Godzilla movies.
|
Sam:
[18:04]
| Yes. And the King Kong, on the King Kong side, I believe this is actually third in both of them. I, of course, have to check that now, too. Da-da-da, da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da-da. Here we go. King Kong franchise. Where's the list? Yes, it's third in both. So the King Kong vs. Godzilla is third in both franchises. But we were doing it on the King Kong side. Now, another side note before I go to the main movie here is that last night, actually last night, it came up when we were picking a random movie to watch that Alex and I should watch the next King Kong movie. But then we realized that the first two king kong movies king kong and son of kong from 1933 i had watched way back in 2015 before alex was watching movies with me he was only six years old at the time so he requested that we restart the king kong franchise so at this very second Yvonne we are halfway through the original King Kong we started it last night and paused because everyone was sleepy how many okay how.
|
Ivan:
[19:28]
| Many movies are there in the.
|
Sam:
[19:29]
| In the King Kong franchise yeah so I I looked this up last night it it depends how you count like Wikipedia has oh well it has the direct to, okay, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, including some direct to video animations in the King Kong site.
|
Ivan:
[19:56]
| 14? Damn.
|
Sam:
[19:58]
| Whereas in comparison, Godzilla has 40.
|
Ivan:
[20:07]
| 40?
|
Sam:
[20:08]
| 40. there.
|
Ivan:
[20:10]
| Are 40 Godzilla movies.
|
Sam:
[20:12]
| Including both including both Japanese and American versions yes wow, fuck that's a lot of movies so Eddie, Anyway, we have restarted the original King Kong with my son as of last night and paused halfway through it. We will continue later today. But my point of all of this extended introduction is that after we watched King Kong vs. Godzilla, we realized we had not actually started the Godzilla franchise yet. So today's movie is the original Godzilla from 1954.
|
Ivan:
[20:52]
| Okay. Okay.
|
Sam:
[20:53]
| So, and I will give it a very similar review to my review of King Kong versus Godzilla, which is that it is a bad movie. However, it is the type of bad movie that is extremely fun to watch. Oh, because because it is bad in an amusing way that keeps you laughing, keeps you making fun of it. Like, you know, when Alex and I watch these movies, like we pause regularly to make snarky comments about the movie or to make fun of the special effects that we're laughing all the time. Because, I mean, my God, it is a guy in a big rubber suit stomping on a model of the city. You know, I mean, and it's just, it's, it's hilarious. I will, of course, read the beginning of the Wikipedia plot summary just for context. But I mean, it's Godzilla. It's the monster goes into Japan and stops on things.
|
Ivan:
[21:55]
| Basically.
|
Sam:
[21:56]
| Anyway, plot in 1954, after the Japanese freighter Aiko Maru is destroyed near Odo Island, another ship, the Bingo Maru, is sent to investigate, only to meet the same fate with few survivors. A fishing boat from Odo is also destroyed with one survivor. Fishing catches mysteriously dropped to zero, blamed by an elder on the ancient sea creature known as Godzilla. Reporters arrive on Odo Island to further investigate. A villager tells one of the reporters that something in the sea is ruining the fishing. That evening, a storm strikes the island, destroying the reporter's helicopter, and Godzilla, briefly seen, destroys 17 homes, kills 9 people, and kills 20 of the villagers' livestock.
|
Sam:
[22:43]
| Odo residents travel to Tokyo to demand disaster relief. The villagers' and reporters' evidence describes damage consistent with something large crushing the village. The government sends paleontologist Kyoto Yamane to investigate the island where giant radioactive footprints and a trilobite are discovered. The village alarm bell is rung and Yamane and the villagers rush to see the monster, retreating after seeing it as a giant dinosaur. Yamane presents his findings in Tokyo, estimating that Godzilla is 50 meters, 160 feet tall, and has evolved from an ancient sea creature, becoming a terrestrial creature. He concludes that Godzilla has been disturbed by underwater hydrogen bomb testing. Debate ensues about notifying the public about the danger of the monster. Meanwhile, 17 ships are lost at sea, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. Plot continues. I will note that we have been making a point to watch the Godzilla movies with Japanese audio and English subtitles.
|
Ivan:
[23:44]
| Titles. Okay.
|
Sam:
[23:45]
| You know, not dubbed into English.
|
Ivan:
[23:48]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[23:48]
| Okay. you know but uh but yeah it's still funny you know it's you know the horrible special i mean this was 1954 you don't expect that much but still even for 1954 it's kind of weak in terms of special effects but honestly that's what gives it its charm the acting is not that great but, Even with, you can tell, even with the language difference, it's not just, you know, oh, the acting's weak, they're speaking Japanese. No, no, you can tell the acting is weak, just generally. But it's all, it's hilarious. I'm going to give it a thumbs up. And you know this whole genre is loved by lots of people specifically because of this kind of feel that i'm talking about you know it's it's nobody i mean some of the modern remakes they're trying to make it a little bit more serious and have a high special effects budget and stuff but the reason people like are fans of these old ones is precisely because they're ridiculous exactly Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[24:56]
| I mean, if I remember when I watched it, the whole thing that, you know, the little bits that I watched, because I'm pretty sure I've not watched any of these in its entirety.
|
Sam:
[25:06]
| All the way through.
|
Ivan:
[25:07]
| Yeah, just bits and pieces. Is that the part that made it funny was exactly that. That it was just the special effects were just dumb. And that's what made it funny.
|
Sam:
[25:16]
| Yeah. And the story is silly and the plot's not, is very thin, you know.
|
Ivan:
[25:23]
| It's just a big dinosaur destroying the city.
|
Sam:
[25:26]
| Well, and they do have humans, like there's side plots going on with the humans. Like there's this guy and his girlfriend and he's trying to, the girlfriend gets in the way of where Godzilla's going to be and he has to save her. And, you know, and then there's various people that you care about or at least theoretically care about. Because they're involved in the battle against Godzilla or they're involved in trying to figure out what's going on or whatever. So there are humans in these movies that have something to do and have some sort of plot, but none of it really matters all that much. The main point is the guy in the rubber suit running around destroying things. So that's movie number one.
|
Ivan:
[26:11]
| Movie number one. Okay.
|
Sam:
[26:14]
| Movie number two. Is from 2003 it is a made for is this correct i just want to make sure i'm pretty sure it was made for tv yes it was made for tv for the sci-fi channel and it's river world from 2003 Have you ever heard of either this or the book?
|
Ivan:
[26:41]
| I had never heard of River World.
|
Sam:
[26:45]
| So River World, I was a fan of the novel series. There was a series of science fiction novels by Philip Jose Farmer that was released from 1971 to 1983. And I remember reading and liking these books as a teenager. So, you know, I was excited, you know, movie coming out about it. And I don't remember if I saw it back in 2003 when it was new. I might have. But, you know, I watched it again last year. And we're not last year. It was actually this year. We're now talking about movies I watched last January. So I'm only 11 months behind.
|
Ivan:
[27:31]
| That's not that bad.
|
Sam:
[27:33]
| Yeah, so.
|
Ivan:
[27:34]
| It's not that bad.
|
Sam:
[27:35]
| Anyway.
|
Ivan:
[27:35]
| I mean, we've been doing the show for 20 years. I mean, you know, it's not that bad.
|
Sam:
[27:40]
| Yeah, I guess so. Anyway, the basic premise of the books, let's start with that, is every human being who's ever lived is resurrected around the banks of a river on an alien planet. And have to and they have to figure out what's going on with the world i never heard of this movie why were they resurrected what was going on who are the beings that brought them there all of this kind of stuff okay i guess i'm looking.
|
Ivan:
[28:14]
| At is this was this a tv movie yeah i guess.
|
Sam:
[28:20]
| Yes okay sci-fi channel.
|
Ivan:
[28:21]
| Okay all right so that's that's one reason i had never heard of this okay All right, yeah.
|
Sam:
[28:26]
| Yeah, and it was intended to be the pilot for a series, but the series never got made. They did try a reboot in 2010 as well. I have not watched that yet.
|
Ivan:
[28:38]
| Well, it wasn't exactly like acclaimed is what I'm looking at here. It's got an IMDb rating of barely 5.1, which is really, really low on IMDb. I mean, a 5.1 is really a clunker on IMDb.
|
Sam:
[28:56]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[28:57]
| It's got, let's see. Before you get to your rating, I'll read here. 5.1 on IMDb, 37% on Rotten Tomatoes, only 41% in Just Watch. At Google users, 58% said they like it, but I have a feeling that this is like a little bit of a selection bias because probably the only people that go there to Google to review it are actually the people that liked it. Probably the rest of the people are not really giving a shit. I'm like, well, this thing sucked. I'm not going to Google to look at it. So that's what I see. So Sam... What are your thoughts?
|
Sam:
[29:34]
| So, I am giving it a thumbs down. It was just, it was not memorable in the slightest. Well, it was not memorable in the slightest in terms of the actual movie itself. The thing is, I, having been a fan of the books.
|
Ivan:
[29:52]
| Ah, I see.
|
Sam:
[29:54]
| It kept annoying me. Differences and things that were done badly and things that were just like, you know, missing. It was not a good adaptation of the books, I felt either. Like they, first of all, they didn't like, it wasn't centered around the same character, you know, like there were, there were a lot of things that just like, I felt like this is not a good adaptation of the books. It's sort of, even the basics of the concept weren't like, just weren't implemented. Well, I kept, there were little details that I kept like stopping it to talk to Alex about like, well, you know, they did this, this way, but in the book that it was like this and they had this thing and like, but in part, like I'll give you one example and I recognize why they did, they wouldn't have done it. This is not an example of why it was a bad adaptation. Any adaptation would have changed this, but it's what I obsessed about. Okay. In the book, like, you know, first of all, everybody's resurrected naked initially.
|
Ivan:
[31:02]
| No, I figured you would like that.
|
Sam:
[31:05]
| They did do that in the movie. I did like that. I enjoyed that. That was good. And they did do that in the movie as well. Although it was a made-for-TV movie, so you didn't see any.
|
Ivan:
[31:15]
| No. This is ridiculous.
|
Sam:
[31:17]
| It was implied nudity rather than actual nudity.
|
Ivan:
[31:19]
| You know.
|
Sam:
[31:20]
| But no, the thing is, they discover these giant mushroom things that once a day erupt and give them little canisters of supplies.
|
Ivan:
[31:33]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[31:34]
| In the books, one of the supplies that comes out of the little canisters are these things that are essentially washcloths with magnetic edges, and people made clothes out of those.
|
Ivan:
[31:48]
| Washcloths with magnetic edges?
|
Sam:
[31:51]
| Yeah. So, like, you could take a bunch of these little squares of fabric and, using the magnets, connect them together and make clothes and stuff.
|
Ivan:
[31:59]
| Interesting.
|
Sam:
[32:00]
| Okay. And I remember reading the books thinking that was a really nifty concept, and I liked the idea. Like, you know, whereas in the TV show, the canisters just contained clothes.
|
Ivan:
[32:12]
| Oh, no, Matt, no. Well, that's just not a good way of doing that.
|
Sam:
[32:20]
| And all kinds of different clothes, too. So the people were wearing all kinds of different things. One of the things in the book is that fashion did arise by people creating different sorts of things out of the magnetic washcloth things. But it was all made out of the same underlying material. Anyway, and obviously this is a change I would have made too if I was adapting it. Like explaining the little washcloth things is a little esoteric. But yeah, it was just completely non-memorable. and for fans of the book it seemed to be not.
|
Sam:
[32:55]
| It didn't do it justice, I think. And also they were trying, they, they moved really fast, really far. Like the books contain, I mean, it was a what five book series. Did I say? Yeah. It ended up being five books and you only very, very slowly start figuring out what's going on in the, in the, in the world that they're talking about. And you know the first book is all about sort of adapting to the fact that you're in this universe and you only find out little tiny glimpse and hints of what's really going on and stuff like that and because they were making a movie out of it they i guess they wanted to accelerate that so you figured out a little bit more about what was happening a little bit faster but you know they were hoping to make a series out of it so they could have still dragged that out longer right you know and and it's they they skipped they still had like.
|
Sam:
[33:57]
| I mean, one of the things is in both the book and the movie is, you know, you get all humans from all time resurrected together. So you get people from different historical periods interacting with each other, which is cool. You get some famous people from different periods. One of the main characters ends up being Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain. Okay you know and and that that's kind of cool i mean he makes a riverboat because you know samuel clemens was a riverboat pilot on the mississippi okay he ends up building a riverboat and blah blah blah and that's in both the the books and the movie but you know anyway it it was it was not great as you read the you know descriptions like if you were a fan of the books maybe watch it for completeness but you know your time would be better spent going and digging the books back up movie.
|
Ivan:
[34:46]
| Adaptations of books are are always like i you know they're such a crapshoot i mean you know there are some that are.
|
Sam:
[34:55]
| Done very well no.
|
Ivan:
[34:56]
| Sometimes they're done.
|
Sam:
[34:57]
| Well some are so bad you you you have to evaluate them on their own merits though like i i'm i'm this comparison to the book thing is somewhat unfair in some cases because it is a different media and different things.
|
Ivan:
[35:11]
| Yeah, but, but some people just make really shitty movies out of good books. I mean, I, I still remember. I, I, I will, I forever think that, you know, from the Clancy book series, there was only like one movie that was a good, that was really good. It was Hunt for Red October. The rest were meh. They weren't that great. I mean, they even brought Harrison Ford in and some of whatever. And honestly, they deviated so much from the book. Okay. In things that didn't need deviating, is my point. They just changed the story completely in many cases. You know, probably the one that was the worst was they did the sum of all fears. And the entire story everything changed okay it just it had no it had barely any you know semblance to what was in the book.
|
Sam:
[36:13]
| That's the kind of adaptation i hate the most actually like.
|
Ivan:
[36:17]
| I'm like why did you use the book then you know yeah.
|
Sam:
[36:21]
| And there are a variety of these and Another was, and I haven't seen this, but I've, well, I won't mention ones that I haven't seen as examples, but even though I've heard people make the complaint. But, yeah, there are certainly ones where really the only thing is sort of the one-sentence high-level concept of the book and maybe a couple of characters.
|
Ivan:
[36:44]
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've seen that.
|
Sam:
[36:45]
| And nothing else matches.
|
Ivan:
[36:47]
| And nothing else matches, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[36:51]
| And that's annoying. Like you said, just make a new one. Don't even bother.
|
Ivan:
[36:57]
| That great example is the Jason Bourne movies. And their source material in the Ludlam books. The reality is, I will say, that the Ludlam books, in my personal opinion, they're kind of dull. Ludlam was not that good. And then a whole bunch of them were written by somebody else that wasn't even him because he died. And then somebody decided to write books in his name anyway. The movies, because the source material of the book was not that great. They actually, well, okay, great. We've got the character born. We know he had amnesia. We know he did this. We know he did that. But if we do what's in the book, this doesn't really work. Okay? All right. Let's do something a lot more exciting. And so even though it carried the name of a book or whatever, whatever happened in the movie was way better than whatever the fuck the source book was. So they did a good job of that, of making the movie a lot better than, in my opinion, a mediocre book.
|
Sam:
[37:59]
| Yeah. Anyway, this is what I would say I would recommend people go read the books. But at the same time, I haven't read them since I was a teenager. So I don't know if I would still like them now.
|
Ivan:
[38:15]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[38:15]
| You know, like they may not have aged well or they may include whatever. Whatever you know so i mean i enjoyed them as a teenager but that was a long time ago again reminding.
|
Ivan:
[38:29]
| Our audience how old we're getting thank you sam.
|
Sam:
[38:32]
| Oh yes yes of course okay shall we take a break and then hit serious stuff serious serious xm radio no not that kind Not the star either.
|
Ivan:
[38:46]
| Not the star either? Okay. All right. We might be time to get serious.
|
Sam:
[38:51]
| Okay. As promised last week, the first break today is a wiki of the day. So enjoy.
|
Ivan:
[38:58]
| Wiki wiki.
|
Sam:
[40:47]
| Okay, now we're back. So, Yvonne, you want to kick it off, picking our first newsy topic? Newsy, news, news, news?
|
Ivan:
[40:57]
| Newsy, newsy. Well, you said it with the newsy pronunciation.
|
Sam:
[41:02]
| Oh, not, not, not Nuzzy. Is it Nuzzy? Is it Nuzzy?
|
Ivan:
[41:05]
| I don't know.
|
Sam:
[41:07]
| You want to talk more about her?
|
Ivan:
[41:09]
| I would really prefer not to. although she was in the news again because she got fired or quit or something um yeah, Oh, if we didn't put a lot in here this week.
|
Sam:
[41:25]
| No, we, our, our list is so sparse this week. I added a couple of things, but like there's.
|
Ivan:
[41:31]
| You know what? I just actually, uh, there is one that was from last Saturday that we didn't talk about. And I actually just pulled up an article on it. It's related to a couple, it's related to cost of living. Okay. Which we didn't talk about.
|
Sam:
[41:46]
| Okay. Let's talk about the cost of living.
|
Ivan:
[41:48]
| So, you know, and I mean, this is relevant politically, like right now, as the Republicans are arguing about what to do about these health subsidies. And they haven't really done anything like right now. And there was an article that i had shared about somebody that was calculating that the that the true poverty line should really be at 130 000 that's a lot.
|
Sam:
[42:22]
| Yvonne what what is it what is it really right now that.
|
Ivan:
[42:25]
| I mean that's like that's like it's 35 000 for for for a for a two person household with two kids. Okay.
|
Sam:
[42:34]
| So for a four person family.
|
Ivan:
[42:36]
| Yeah. $35,000, which I don't care where you are living in the United States. I mean, you're, you're at that point, you are heavily dependent on government aid to, to really be able to eke out a sustainable existence, okay? There's just no way at $35,000. I mean, at that level with a family, you need to be getting SNAP, Medicaid.
|
Ivan:
[43:07]
| Maybe even some housing assistance, I mean, in order to be able to pay. Because look at $35,000, here's one of the issues that you've got right now. $35,000 gross, okay? One of the things is that we have one of the most regressive taxes that we have is Social Security tax. So anybody at the $35,000 level cannot escape paying the 7% for, 7.5% for Social Security, okay? So that right off the bat.
|
Ivan:
[43:39]
| You know, takes away $2,600, okay? Right off the bat, no exemptions, no nothing. Yet unemployment tax, other stuff or whatever, that gets you up to $3,000. You can't get out of those. So you're already down to $32,000 right off the bat, okay? Add sales tax anywhere that you live for any money that you spend. You're buying shit, you're paying sales tax, okay? That also takes a chunk out of these people as well. Another probably, they got to be spending $10,000 to $15,000 a year in taxable stuff. That's another $1,000. So you're really down to like $30,000 of actual money. Divide that by 12 months for $2,500 for a family of four. When you are looking at a median car payment right now, a $750, in an America that is heavily dependent on cars, okay? Think about this. On a family of four, for sure, half their money is going to transportation, even if they bought used cars.
|
Sam:
[44:49]
| Yeah, I was going to say, the $750 is for like a new car, though, right?
|
Ivan:
[44:52]
| Yeah. Right. But, okay. But take it down to a used car. Take it down that they have two used cars. Say they're paying $350 a month for each. But they're going to need two cars. And most of this nation, if you've got two kids, I mean, so that gets you the $700. Add auto insurance. Auto insurance right now.
|
Sam:
[45:19]
| $400 on the median. I definitely know where, you know, yes, they ideally would need two cars. Lots and lots of families deal without because they just can't.
|
Ivan:
[45:32]
| Okay, but most of the time they can't deal with one car. The reality is that those families somehow have to scrounge how to get a second one. Because there's just, if the, if the two people have jobs and if they have kids, there's just no, I mean.
|
Sam:
[45:48]
| And they're living in some place without adequate public transportation.
|
Ivan:
[45:52]
| Public transportation, which is most of this nation. You have to figure it out. But once you add, think about this. Two car payments of $350, $700. Add car insurance, $400. You're at $1,100. Add gas. Not cheap right now, all right? $300, $400 a month. You're already at $1,500. These people have $1,000 just in the transportation. They haven't paid for a place to live. They haven't bought food. I mean, so saying that above that, you're not in poverty at $40,000 is crazy. And the thing is, when they were talking about the $130,000, look, they were considering a household payment that basically you're paying $2,000 for your house, $1,000 for your groceries, $1,500 for your car transportation. And one of the things that a lot of people have to pay for is daycare, which I've seen to a lot. If you're paying for daycare, $2,000 a month if you have to pay for daycare.
|
Sam:
[47:01]
| And I believe I read that the person who did this analysis used, picked a county in New Jersey as their sample. And obviously there are places that are more and less expensive. But it's in the ballpark.
|
Ivan:
[47:14]
| But the thing is that I said, listen, take out $30,000. Listen, take out the daycare. Take it down. If you made this down to $90,000, okay, and not the $130,000 because you picked, like, a lower place to live, you do the math after tax and whatever, especially because one of the problems that they're talking about in an article I just shared today is the benefit clips, okay? Because what's the problem? And this is a problem, like, with... A lot of what Biden kept trying to do, which he couldn't do as much as he wanted to, was to help people in the middle class because of those benefit cliffs, like with child tax credits and stuff or whatever. How to get universal. Remember how he wanted to institute one of the things that, you know, oh, the Democrats don't care about the middle class. Biden was out saying he tried his damnedest to make sure that people had universal access to daycare.
|
Sam:
[48:16]
| This is one of those things, by the way, I just want to say, like, to me, it is like malpractice when politicians put in place things with cliffs to begin with. Like, come on, folks, like on almost anything, you can design the program. So instead of having a hard cut for those who don't know, benefit cliffs are things like where there is a hard and fast threshold.
|
Ivan:
[48:42]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[48:43]
| Below it, you get some benefit. Above it, you do not.
|
Ivan:
[48:45]
| You got zero.
|
Sam:
[48:47]
| And so it creates a system where, like, let's say the threshold is on income. And just for the sake of argument, let's say it's $20,000 as a threshold. If you make $19,999.99, you get the benefit. You make one penny more, you get nothing.
|
Ivan:
[49:08]
| That's right.
|
Sam:
[49:08]
| You know, and sometimes they're not quite that harsh.
|
Ivan:
[49:11]
| They're not quite that steep, but they are pretty steep. Yes.
|
Sam:
[49:15]
| And it is not that tough to create things where instead of having hard thresholds, you have a graduation that goes from over an extended length of time that sort of eliminates that threshold. Where if you're at a low enough level, you get the full benefit. And as you make more and more money, you get less and less benefit up to the point where you can afford to pay for it yourself. And now you get zero. You know, but and I've I've often advocated for just just give everybody the benefit and tax it back from the people who can't afford it as just a simple model anyway.
|
Ivan:
[49:58]
| And you. Yeah. And you. And that makes sense. I agree with your with your thinking with that.
|
Sam:
[50:04]
| But in reality, we've got lots and lots of programs with these cliffs which cause all kinds of incentive problems. They cause people to like, not like they can't make more money because if they did, they would lose their benefit and stuff like that. And it's just like, it completely messes up incentives. Also, it creates a huge bureaucracy to enforce the threshold because you have to measure whatever it is that is the threshold. They often have to do extra paperwork. There are all kinds of problems with it. But anyway, go ahead.
|
Ivan:
[50:35]
| So the whole the whole thing is that this goes to this entire thing where, you know, how Trump has been getting upset because he's been getting hit on affordability and how his ratings on the economy keep keep diving. And this entire thing also with the health care health care subsidies being, you know, eliminated by the by the GOP for a lot of people. And this is the shit sitting the affordability crisis. This is the end. And the Republicans are not doing anything about it. They couldn't they they pay lip service to it, but not actually doing anything. And I get people like I get people that keep saying, well, the Democrats didn't try to do anything with it. Damn it. Biden tried really, really hard to do certain things to actually address this. You know, and none of the Republicans were in for it. OK, you had the whole issue with they didn't have enough votes with, you know, Manchin and Sinema. Manchin kept blocking a lot of this stuff as well, okay? And so the reality is that he was trying very hard to do shit, to directly address these things. And the Republicans would have none of it. None of it. And so...
|
Ivan:
[51:50]
| In his first year, he was able to get people child tax credit checks, okay? He was able, and he had pushed his stuff to try to get every, he wanted to give everybody fucking child care. So people were not like that example in $130,000 where you're living in a place and you're having to pay $2,500, $3,000 for daycare for your kids. So people are in the workforce and they're not going broke and they're not making the decision of the of, you know, because it almost becomes unless the job is making a ton of money, you can't afford that, that, that, that child care. It makes no sense to be basically working just to be paying child care. It just doesn't for many people. And so at that point.
|
Sam:
[52:42]
| You might as well stay home and take care of the kid.
|
Ivan:
[52:44]
| Exactly. But that also harms the workforce as well.
|
Sam:
[52:50]
| You know, and you still need money for other things.
|
Ivan:
[52:54]
| And you still need money for other things. And so, and there was another article that was like, that I was looking at today, and this has been going around, that with surging auto debt, that repos across the U.S., they talk about that car dependent Miami feels the pain. But the reality is that across the board in the United States right now, there is a surge in car repossessions. OK, there was this this report out like right now that found that annual car repossessions and low defaults fall rates are at the highest since the years during and immediately after the Great Recession. Think about this. people are defaulting on their cars at levels not seen since the 2008 financial crisis. I mean... People are really, really, really struggling, okay? This is really bad. And we've got Republicans at the helm that don't seem to give a shit.
|
Sam:
[53:59]
| I heard Donald Trump say this week that the affordability crisis is a Democratic scam. It's all just a bunch of lies.
|
Ivan:
[54:09]
| That is correct. That is exactly what he said, yes. That is exactly what he said.
|
Sam:
[54:13]
| Isn't he right?
|
Ivan:
[54:15]
| Oh, of course he's right. It's all scam. No, he's not right. Fucking asshole. And here's another problem that we've got right now. They keep focusing on the Fed lowering rates, blah, blah, blah. I have been talking about how because of what Trump has done this year, because of his actions with foreign trade and alienating foreign buyers of U.S. treasuries. Even with expected interest rate cuts, none of those are making a dent on the 30-year mortgage rate, okay? The 30-year mortgage rate is not dependent on the short-term rates that the Fed sets. It's dependent on the 10-year U.S. Treasury 10-year rate. And that fucker won't budge. It is not moving down. It's not moving down. And there was nothing that they could do to make it move down. In large part because it takes policy changes to...
|
Ivan:
[55:17]
| To, well, policy changes that Trump already made have made it that the stupid rate is remaining stubbornly high. And none of those are easy to undo. The trade war is the main reason why the stupid 10-year won't go down. And because he hasn't really backed off on any of this shit, it's causing the problem where you've got, A, you've got affordability for a lot of shit where people are struggling right now because inflation is is is higher than it's the e-pushed inflation back up and it's pushing interest rates higher because the reason why the 10-year dropped had a lot to do with our trade balance and our trading partners willing to be holding u.s treasuries and they have had because of Trump, they have been less willing to hold them unless they get paid more. That's the way the bond market works. OK, you know, you will hold something that's very sure that you feel safer and pay a lower rate. But if you start feeling insecure about it, then the rate goes up.
|
Sam:
[56:34]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[56:35]
| You're a higher risk. You need to pay more. And Trump has made that America is a higher risk. A borrower. And there is nothing that he is doing that's going to fix that.
|
Sam:
[56:48]
| So speaking more broadly than just affordability, you know, we've got a ton of recession indicators, don't we?
|
Ivan:
[56:57]
| Oh, my God. Everything is flashing red. Yes.
|
Sam:
[57:00]
| So so go into that a little bit more.
|
Ivan:
[57:02]
| Jobs. OK, this week. OK, by the way, they went and decided not to publish a whole bunch of economic data.
|
Sam:
[57:11]
| Oh really well why we i don't understand like what why do you think.
|
Ivan:
[57:18]
| That could be sam do you think it's because it was all it all looked great.
|
Sam:
[57:22]
| Yvonne we know that they have said that these these all of these metrics they've discovered were being manipulated by the democrats and were bullshit numbers so they have to get a handle on everything they can't publish it while they don't know.
|
Ivan:
[57:39]
| Ah, that's why. Yeah, no. Obviously, it has to be because all the data was shipped. The ADP jobs report showed that we had the worst period of hiring that we've had in years as well in terms of private sector hiring. It's been awful. We had the most layoff notices that we've had since the Great Recession. I don't know if you've heard about this story.
|
Sam:
[57:59]
| I am proud to be part of that, you know, that story.
|
Ivan:
[58:02]
| Okay, yeah. I mean, yeah.
|
Sam:
[58:04]
| I have contributed in my own way.
|
Ivan:
[58:08]
| I mean, it's one of those things where all the fucking indicators are flashing red, okay, about this. Yeah. And the fact that the only thing that held up GDP this year is investment in AI.
|
Sam:
[58:26]
| Oh, God. Yeah. That makes it feel good. There's no, like, frothy bubble there or anything. Yeah.
|
Ivan:
[58:36]
| Look, there are things in the, in the AI space that obviously has happened with a lot of these waves that are overvalued. I don't doubt that there's a whole bunch of things, but also I think we've got, I think we've got on that space. We've got opinions like that are all over the place about this, right?
|
Sam:
[58:55]
| I had shared on the, on, on the show, one of the shows while you were in surgery, the one where Bruce and Ed were on. Um i talked about i shared this on the curmudgeons corner slack too but there was there was some chart i believe it was in the economist where they said predictions on ai's effect on world gdp they're all had a chart well basically the two extremes of the thing were one that went up to infinity when you get the singularity and ai takes over everything and one that goes down to zero because the ai causes human extinction and and that that was the extremes extremes of the prediction you know so it's like okay and.
|
Ivan:
[59:43]
| That's and that's basically what you you see in the market and with everybody talking about this there that that is basically the spread of opinions i think that, objectively looking at this i i what are the one of the things you know they keep trying to compare it to 2000 and the tech bubble there well there's one thing one of the things that was the biggest issue in the 2000 tech bubbles there's no monetization they kept building cool shit without any way to monetize it okay all right that that's not what's happening with any of this ai stuff there there there is clearly a path to monetizing this i mean i i you know i i have seen this happen like with a lot of what a lot of the things that are being done that that i don't i don't have a i don't have an issue with finding the the ways to monetize it but i also find so many people that decry it yet it you said adoption is no nobody's using this stuff that that's bullshit oh.
|
Sam:
[1:00:51]
| Everybody's using it.
|
Ivan:
[1:00:52]
| Everybody's using it everybody's using it and people sometimes are using it they don't even know they're using it okay and.
|
Sam:
[1:00:59]
| Like in my example and i'm paying i am.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:02]
| Paying several.
|
Sam:
[1:01:03]
| Ai companies at.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:04]
| This very moment i i think.
|
Sam:
[1:01:07]
| I'm i'm paying cursor i'm paying anthropic i'm paying open ai right now i've got regular monthly subscriptions for all three of them i use one of them a lot more than the other two so i may want to change that up at some point but like at the moment i'm using all three.
|
Ivan:
[1:01:22]
| And yeah and i'm using it practically every day and and listen of the younger generation those people can't live school right.
|
Sam:
[1:01:34]
| How would you write an essay for school without ChatGPT?
|
Ivan:
[1:01:38]
| I told you that my experience, I bumped into a guy that said that he doesn't understand how he could write an email without AI anymore. And so I see a lot of people, you hear a lot of loud people complaining, oh, they're forcing me a copilot and this or whatever. I don't want to, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Where the reality is that we've got an entire generation of people right now that are 100% dependent on AI for basic things every day. So when they are trying to tell me how this is a complete bubble, that they're building shit that nobody is using, that is absolutely a lie.
|
Sam:
[1:02:11]
| And by the way, the adoption rate on this is insanely high. I mean, the stuff we're talking about didn't exist three years ago.
|
Ivan:
[1:02:20]
| Two years! So that's why when I go, when I see people, they're trying to tell me, look, is there stuff that could be, that is overvalued, okay? That, you know, we're overpaying for it. That where maybe they may be overspending in the short term on certain things. I believe that. But the reality is that.
|
Sam:
[1:02:41]
| Or the typical pattern that happens on all kinds of waves like this, where the first run companies who are really driving it and like burning out and not making the monetization work. And it's the second wave that ends up being the ones that really.
|
Ivan:
[1:03:00]
| Or something. Or something happens in the middle. Listen, with a lot of things, let me give an example of like real estate, like back in 2008, a lot of, you know, we're talking about how there was a lot of overbuilding into 2008. But the reality is that in the next five years, all that real estate got bought up. And by the way, the prices that we thought were crazy in 2008 now are cheap.
|
Sam:
[1:03:25]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:03:26]
| And so that's the thing where these waves sometimes wind up, it happened in the PC industry in the 90s, where all of a sudden there was a wave of overbuilding of PCs, and all of a sudden they tried to put too many PCs on the market, and all of a sudden they had to cut prices in order to get people to buy, and some companies lost money for a little bit because of whatever. But then after, you know what, now, whatever.
|
Sam:
[1:03:53]
| Look, generally speaking, I mean, these bubbles and such aren't necessarily saying this thing pops and is gone forever. It's just that there's stuff that's premature and over, you know. And so, yeah, you get the up, you get the down, and then you have it slowly go back up again. And very well end up higher than the bubble was.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:16]
| Well, there were a lot of things in the bubble. But listen, but there are certain things in the bubble that we talk about in bubble that are like impossible. It was like, you know what? Like people were paying 400 times earnings for Cisco.
|
Ivan:
[1:04:29]
| There was no mathematical model ever to get to 400 times earnings to make Cisco sell enough to make that value make sense. OK, but right now, when they're trying to tell me that NVIDIA is in a bubble where they are, they're comparing. I got people comparing NVIDIA to Cisco, whereas NVIDIA is like a 30, 20 some odd times future earnings, whereas Cisco was at 400 times. I'm like, OK, guys, look, you guys are not looking at the numbers. You guys are not looking at the numbers. I'm sorry, but you're comparing two things that are different. Now, when you're telling me that you've got a Palantir that's at 500 times earnings and that I can't make or figure out how in the world they're going to, you know, make that kind of money. And you've got a Tesla out there and you've got some other stuff that's like valued like that. Yes, I do agree. And there's a whole bunch of overvaluation and there is that kind of stuff. But I do think but the biggest thing that I keep seeing is all these people trying to go on TV and try to tell me how nobody uses AI. AI doesn't work or whatever, blah, blah, blah. Let me tell you something. AI can do a whole bunch of fucked up things. And like you said, I think it is one of the most polarizing technologies that we have ever deployed. And it shows that that economist article that you mentioned where the spread was.
|
Ivan:
[1:05:58]
| Why the spread was, why they're going to be destroyed by it or, you know, the edge of the outcomes was like the entire spectrum of the existence of the planet, basically. Yeah. I think that, but people to say that it's not being used when I see so many people right now that basically just depend on it every day.
|
Sam:
[1:06:26]
| And as we've talked about this technology, it's also continuing to evolve very rapidly. I mean, when we started talking about this two years ago, you know, there were all kinds of problems. And it was bad.
|
Ivan:
[1:06:42]
| And it was bad.
|
Sam:
[1:06:44]
| And, and, you know, we, and in some ways it still is, but the ratio of utility to badness is shifting over time. It is getting better over time.
|
Ivan:
[1:06:55]
| It is getting a lot better.
|
Sam:
[1:06:56]
| And it is, and even at this point, like even comparing, if you go back and look three months, there's a noticeable difference, let alone if you're looking back a year. And, and, and so it's really hard to predict where we're going. And, and there is the, you know, like you said, there is the question of, okay, you can see the path to monetization, but we're still very much in the phase where all of these companies are spending a shit ton more than they're making in order to grow the technologies, do the improvement, you know? Yeah. But like a lot of the big name brands that everybody talks about, you know, you're, you're, but they're, they're investing that to continue improving the technology to spur that adoption. You know, all the usual things that happen in the early growth stages of things. And so the question is, where does all that stabilize and who's left standing? Do you have a game of musical chairs and you've got like 10 players and five and only two of them survive? Maybe, you know, maybe.
|
Ivan:
[1:08:01]
| Maybe, maybe. for all we know. But bottom line is that you know...
|
Sam:
[1:08:07]
| Anyway, you were saying this is the only thing that GDP got down on.
|
Ivan:
[1:08:12]
| That is a GDP. The thing is that I don't... You know, I think that, Obviously, there could be too much froth in this, but saying that it's just, this isn't a tulip bulb bubble. Okay, all right.
|
Sam:
[1:08:28]
| I will say, by the way, by the way, if you account for everything, you know, tulips are probably cost more than they did during the tulip craze. At least nominally. Probably not.
|
Ivan:
[1:08:43]
| Nominally. Probably not. Yeah, not, not, not.
|
Sam:
[1:08:45]
| Because it was like people were spending their entire year's income on one tulip and stuff.
|
Ivan:
[1:08:50]
| Yes. I don't think tulips are that expensive like right now. I wonder how much a tulip bulb is right now. That's a great question.
|
Sam:
[1:08:58]
| You should get the long-term chart of tulip bulbs going all the way back to the tulip.
|
Ivan:
[1:09:02]
| I should try to find one of those. But anyway, the bottom line is that, unfortunately, the economy is only being held up by that. And that's not a lot of companies that are in this gig.
|
Sam:
[1:09:14]
| Well, in general, I've seen a number of people talk about how the uneven distribution of the economy is a significant issue in terms of companies. Like you mentioned, there's somebody did a chart where they're like, here's the S&P 500. Here's the S&P 500 without the 10 companies who are doing well.
|
Ivan:
[1:09:35]
| Now, to be fair, I looked at that, and to be fair, even since 2020, the increase in the stock market on the non-whatever companies, the ones that are not involved in that, was 120%. That's not a bad return, okay?
|
Sam:
[1:09:52]
| But the other ones.
|
Ivan:
[1:09:53]
| It's 1,000-plus percent, yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:09:56]
| Well, and in the last year, the others have been more down. Right. Um, and, and then, but also I've seen like analysis of like things like consumer spending and stuff. Consumer spending is being held up by the top 10%. Like the top 10% who's invested in the stock market, making money from the stock market, all this kind of stuff, they're doing well. They're spending lots of money. They're doing, you know, they're buying their lots of Christmas presents. The other 90% is hunkering down.
|
Ivan:
[1:10:29]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:10:30]
| And so you see that division as well.
|
Ivan:
[1:10:33]
| Not totally. And so this is not sustainable. This is not sustainable. We're going to, you know, and the problem that the GOP has is politically, this is a time bomb in their hands. Because really the guys that are hurting, for the most part, are their constituents. Those are the guys that had voted them in because supposedly the Biden economy wasn't working for them and the Republicans were going to fix the economy. And what they have done is make it incredibly worse for them. And all the surveys right now show that. And they're not doing anything to fix it.
|
Sam:
[1:11:15]
| Yvonne, has this pattern happened before? Has this pattern happened before? Have Republicans come in when the Democrats left them a good economy, and then something happens? It's just bad luck, right?
|
Ivan:
[1:11:28]
| Yeah, it's just bad luck, yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:11:30]
| Oh, it's because the Democrats really left them a mess.
|
Ivan:
[1:11:34]
| Yeah, they left them a mess. I mean, October— Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:11:38]
| This has happened before. This is this has been like the typical pattern for Republican administration, Republican administration going back like decades now.
|
Ivan:
[1:11:46]
| Yeah. October 2024. There is an article in The Economist on the cover.
|
Sam:
[1:11:53]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:11:53]
| That the headline was The American Economy, The Envy of the World. Yeah. That was the headline over 2024. And right now, it's a basket case. Like right now, it really is. I mean, it's being held up by one massive technology shift that has caused a massive spend in that direction. But the rest of the economy is stagnating. It's suffering badly I mean, All these immigration rates are hitting the economy negatively, okay? All right? They're driving up costs, okay? You've got, you know, in some places now, you've got a dearth of workers for certain things, okay? And what it's doing, it's driving up costs of construction and some other things because they can't get workers for that, okay? And then you've got on the other part where he went and he took a, he took a, they took a chainsaw to the federal government and cut hundreds of thousands of jobs, driving up costs because the deficit went up while creating a mass of unemployed people at the same time.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:19]
| And they went and they raised the tariffs, which impacted a lot of medium businesses, small, medium businesses, and it's impacting individuals heavily because it's driving up costs. It's just, it's everything that they've done is just bad for the economy. All of it. This week, they were trying to tout how we, oh, we're bringing, we're going to bring back manufacturing of chips to the U.S. Fuck, Biden had been working on that and had more success than that over the last four years with the Chips Act than they ever did in their lifetime.
|
Sam:
[1:13:57]
| It was a whole big thing.
|
Ivan:
[1:13:59]
| Yeah, and it was making progress. All the green manufacturing with the new energy, they hit that too. So they fucked that part of the industry too, which was also surging, everything they have done you know it's the saying oh my god what the hell this political commentator said I think it was Conway everything Trump touches dies yes.
|
Sam:
[1:14:33]
| So, Yvonne, I guess we can save the real predictions for the prediction show for next year. But, like, how bad is this going to get worse before it gets better, right?
|
Ivan:
[1:14:42]
| Oh, God, yes. It's going to get a lot worse. I'm not turning this around anytime soon. No, they're not doing it. Like I said, they're not doing anything to fix it. They're making it worse. Look, when people's pocketbooks get hit next year with the double whammy of losing insurance coverage or those that keep it have their... This is tens of millions of households that are getting this impact. Think about all the other impacts that they've had negative. Aside from, okay, great. So now they've got their health insurance rates are soaring. So that reduces their disposable income. Bam. You got that. They also went on student loans. Remember? Student debt. Remember how that was also a big positive on the economy because they were forgiving a lot of that and suspended payments on a lot of those? Well, they lifted all of that.
|
Sam:
[1:15:32]
| Okay yep that's.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:35]
| Also hitting millions and millions of people as well they.
|
Sam:
[1:15:39]
| Just keep.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:40]
| Fucking people sam.
|
Sam:
[1:15:42]
| So yvonne order of magnitude are we talking about short quick recession that people barely notice are we talking 2008 level great recession or are we talking 1929 level Great Depression.
|
Ivan:
[1:15:57]
| I'm thinking more early 90s style recession.
|
Sam:
[1:16:03]
| Okay, tell me more about, What was that like? I should remember.
|
Ivan:
[1:16:08]
| The early 90s recession was a period of very low growth to negative growth where employment was, you know, people were struggling to find jobs and costs were rising. Okay. And that's why H.W. Bush lost. We were coming off a bank bust at that time where there had been a massive bank bailout because this was the S&L crisis. And this was also a part where the defense industry was shrinking because of the end of the Cold War. And that caused a lot of layoffs. Okay. And so employment was muted. You know, people were struggling to get jobs. The automakers were also laying off a lot of people because they had been getting hammered by imports at the time. GM and Ford were not doing very well against our foreign competitors. And I think that you're going to get a style like that where.
|
Ivan:
[1:17:21]
| We're having right now a period of more like stagflation where we've got high costs and higher unemployment for a while, like right now at this point. One of the reasons I don't think balance sheets for a lot of people and companies are in better shape than they have been at in the 80s and 90s or at other times. And so I think that that that's one reason why we're not talking about 2008 levels, but we're talking more like now it looks more like early 90s kind of where it was hard to find a job. I don't know if you recall, but I do recall that it was like when we got out, when we graduated from college in 93, it was a tough job market for us is a very tough job market for us to find a job in 93. And that was like because of the effects of that recession that we that that come out and like the the shrinking defense budgets and all of this stuff and whatever and how that lowered employment how, the auto industry was shrinking how we were it was it was it was a difficult economy so that's that's i think what we're facing right now okay very cheery way for arrest this turn yeah i.
|
Sam:
[1:18:47]
| I I figure it's time to take a break and move on.
|
Ivan:
[1:18:49]
| Yeah. Yeah. There you go.
|
Sam:
[1:18:51]
| Okay. We'll take a quick break. I'll come back and I'll preview to try to cheer things up a little bit. I'm going to talk about this week's election results and.
|
Ivan:
[1:19:02]
| Oh, there you go. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:19:04]
| You know, how things might be looking for next year's elections.
|
Ivan:
[1:19:08]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:19:09]
| Back after this. Okay, we are back. So, elections. We had this race, congressional race in Tennessee. The Democrat did lose, but they were expected to lose. Yes. The question was margins. Now, I know some people were hoping they would pull out an upset, but the reality is they lost by, I forget the exact number, it ended up being like 6% or something. But this was a district that Trump had won by 22%.
|
Ivan:
[1:20:20]
| 2%, yes.
|
Sam:
[1:20:21]
| It's a huge shift. And if you look at some of the maps that show shift per county or shift per whatever subgeographic area, they were all moving blue. Like very red areas were moving blue by a significant direction. And if you look at all of the special elections that have been going on since the 2024 election, on average, and I'm going to forget the exact number, but it's somewhat like 10%, maybe even a little bit more, of the shift towards the Democrats. And this is huge like if if this replicates it all and and you look you have people have pointed out special elections are special there tend to be more motivated people that come out and it's a different kind of electorate than in a midterm let alone like every four-year presidential election but it's a different sort of people that come out for special elections so they're not 100 percent predictive and you can get divergences. But generally speaking, if you look at the last however many midterm cycles, when one party is winning special elections by this margin, they end up taking the House of Representatives like 60, 70 percent of the time.
|
Ivan:
[1:21:49]
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. Agreed. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:21:51]
| And, You know, and we're talking about, you know, there was also news about the Texas redistricting and the Supreme Court, like, upheld the districts that, well, they let them stand for now.
|
Ivan:
[1:22:06]
| Right, until a case goes through. Right.
|
Sam:
[1:22:08]
| But the case won't go through before next year's elections. Basically, these maps will be in place for 2026. But what you have here is also the scenario where, look, people weren't all talking about how they gerrymandered these maps to gain five more seats.
|
Sam:
[1:22:27]
| But that kind of assumes that the electorate looks a lot like it did in 2024. Right if you if you've got a 10 12 point shift in the electorate then a lot of these seats that they had gerrymandered thinking they were so safe they could afford to dilute them a little bit and take over some blue areas and and kill those seat democratic seats are are at risk right and and And just more generally, if, you know, I had talked on this show a while back about, you know, people had done analysis that if everybody did all the gerrymandering for their party that they could legally do before 2026, so Texas does their thing, California does their thing, blah, blah, blah. The most typical scenario is it would represent a Republican gain of between five and 10 seats that they get out of that effort net between, you know, Democrats doing their thing, Republicans doing their thing. If you have a scenario where the overall shift is 10 to 12 points towards the Democrats, that swamps that five to 10 seats.
|
Ivan:
[1:23:46]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[1:23:47]
| You know, and and you're you know, you're talking a wave election and you're talking, you know, you may have a shift of, you know, 30 seats overall, which is more than enough to bring the Democrats back into the House. And may may may even put the Senate at risk, which, you know, had been viewed as sort of potentially out of reach. Like, you know, the best case scenario for Democrats was getting the getting the House back, but they probably wouldn't get the Senate back because it's just a bad set of races for the Democrats for Senate. But if you're talking about that big wave, there's at least a chance for the Senate. You're maybe not going to predict it, but it becomes in play where maybe it wasn't before. And so, and this all has to do with the stuff that you were talking about in the last segment, Yvonne. It's like, yeah.
|
Ivan:
[1:24:44]
| And they're not doing anything to fix it, which is the problem.
|
Sam:
[1:24:47]
| They're not doing anything to fix it, but I just, and speaking more.
|
Ivan:
[1:24:51]
| You know what they're doing? We're building a ballroom, Sam. I don't know if you saw. And the ballroom keeps getting bigger. And the ballroom keeps getting bigger and bigger.
|
Sam:
[1:24:58]
| I know. And he fired the architect who didn't want to make it as big. So you have to get another one now.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:06]
| But I don't know if this one will either, because he hired an architect that is the guy that has done so much of the construction in D.C. Historically. OK, which is the weird thing. And I thought, wait a minute, you went with with a guy who's basically his career has been spent trying to preserve D.C. Looking a certain way. I don't know how the hell this guy is going to go and just agree with doing that.
|
Sam:
[1:25:28]
| Yeah. Well, anyway, like I'm sure this guy will get fired.
|
Ivan:
[1:25:31]
| Too, is what I'm saying.
|
Sam:
[1:25:32]
| Yes. OK. But, but what, Back to what I was talking about, I think the shift is not—it's twofold, and it's always complicated what factors are at play. But one is Democrats are really riled up. The Democrats are turning out for these things. They are really upset. They are turning out. They are voting for their people. And by the way, this person who came really close in Tennessee was not a moderate Democrat. They were a fairly progressive Democrat. So like this sort of is, you know, you get the whole arguments about like, well, what kind of Democrats should the Democrats be running and is, you know, adapting to the district and make sure like in a place like Tennessee, of course, like if a Democrat is going to win, it's going to have to be a Republican light type candidate. And no, this was not a Republican light type candidate.
|
Sam:
[1:26:31]
| They did well anyway. now would, Maybe if they'd run a Republican light, they would have actually won. I don't know. But, you know, anyway, but that's item one. Number two is disillusioned Republicans, where maybe these Republicans aren't going to vote for Democrats. Some of them in the wishy-washy middle might. But a lot of, you hear over and over again, these people saying, this isn't what I voted for. Now, on the one hand, yes, it is, you damn idiot.
|
Ivan:
[1:27:06]
| You fucking idiot. Yes. Yes, it is. You fucking morons. It's exactly what you voted for. They told you, you know, they told you they were going to eat your face. They told it to you right to your face. And what you said is that the Democrats are exaggerating about it.
|
Sam:
[1:27:21]
| Or lying.
|
Ivan:
[1:27:22]
| That they didn't really mean it. Or lying.
|
Sam:
[1:27:23]
| Just outright lying.
|
Ivan:
[1:27:24]
| Lying. That they didn't mean it. Right.
|
Sam:
[1:27:26]
| But, you know, yes, the administration has been doing exactly what they said they were going to do. And so all these people go, oh, this is, I didn't expect this, blah, blah, blah. Come on give me a fucking break but you know and part of it is economy you have a lot of the people are saying like he promised prices would come down prices haven't come down no.
|
Ivan:
[1:27:48]
| Days day one he was gonna cut kill inflation on day one sam.
|
Sam:
[1:27:52]
| No not just kill inflation who's gonna make prices go down go down you know like and those discount houses.
|
Ivan:
[1:28:01]
| Sam are the discount.
|
Sam:
[1:28:03]
| Houses available at the Trump Center for Peace. Eggs really did come down, didn't they?
|
Ivan:
[1:28:10]
| Eggs did really come down. As a matter of fact, speaking of eggs, I went recently and I ordered...
|
Sam:
[1:28:21]
| A Fabergé egg?
|
Ivan:
[1:28:22]
| Well, I did not order a Fabergé egg, but I did order eggs online to get from Costco. And the thing is that I saw the item And I'm like, okay, it said eggs. I didn't look at how many eggs I bought. Okay. I mean, I have been eating eggs right now from that order for the past couple of months. And I have been like making like massive egg, egg, like it was so many eggs. Okay. I got, it must be like 60 eggs or something like that. Some crazy amount. It was a box. It was literally, instead of like, you know, one of these like two little rope, you know, egg carton things.
|
Sam:
[1:29:08]
| Not a dozen.
|
Ivan:
[1:29:09]
| It was a box double stacked with eggs. I mean, it was just crazy. Now, what I will say is that the reason why I didn't think I was getting that many eggs was because it was cheap. I saw the price, and I think that that box cost me like $9. And I'm like thinking I'm getting a dozen maybe two dozen eggs tops or whatever no I got holy shit Sam I got a ton of eggs, for very little money so yes the price of eggs did come down yes but lots of other prices have not lots of other prices have definitely not they keep talking here's the thing they keep talking supposedly how there's gas at less than two bucks a gallon somewhere And they're literally for there is no place in the United States where you can get that nothing. It doesn't exist. But they keep talking about.
|
Sam:
[1:30:09]
| Right. Yeah. So look, prices is one of these things where people are talking and, but also on other things too. I mean, even the immigration stuff, which is supposedly one of the, you know, things that Donald Trump was stronger about. And it's an issue that the Democrats are weak on and whatever. You get all these people saying, you know, I, I want, I thought he was going to get rid of the criminals, but he's going after everybody, you know?
|
Ivan:
[1:30:42]
| Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:30:42]
| And again, again, this is one of those things, well, this is exactly what he said he was going to do. I'm sorry.
|
Ivan:
[1:30:49]
| Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:30:49]
| So I'm sorry.
|
Ivan:
[1:30:50]
| I found my receipt. So, so, so I wouldn't lie.
|
Sam:
[1:30:53]
| For you, you're back on the eggs, back on the eggs.
|
Ivan:
[1:30:54]
| Yeah. Kirkland Signature Eggs, large. What I didn't see, it was five dozens.
|
Sam:
[1:31:01]
| Five dozen. Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:31:02]
| I got five dozen eggs for $14.97.
|
Sam:
[1:31:06]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:31:07]
| Five dozen. Basically $3 a dozen.
|
Sam:
[1:31:12]
| Okay.
|
Ivan:
[1:31:13]
| Very cheap. But yeah, I got five dozen eggs. This is ridiculous.
|
Sam:
[1:31:19]
| You know, if I was a little bit closer, I'd come over for a few omelets.
|
Ivan:
[1:31:24]
| I still got some eggs left from it. Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:31:29]
| No, but yeah, look, there are a lot of disillusioned Trump supporters. And third? The Epstein stuff. We're sort of in a lull with Epstein news, but that'll hit in a couple more weeks. We're about halfway through the 30 days.
|
Ivan:
[1:31:47]
| I mean, it's going to blow up again, right? Because if they don't...
|
Sam:
[1:31:50]
| It will blow up again.
|
Ivan:
[1:31:51]
| Because... Here are the scenarios, right? They have dragged on releasing it because it's bad. So we know that it's got to be bad. So that's why they keep dragging on releasing it. Either they'll try to refuse to release it again or to release something so redacted that we run out of ink trying to print it.
|
Sam:
[1:32:13]
| Right.
|
Ivan:
[1:32:14]
| And it's going to leave because it's so redacted that what it's going to do is make it blow up again because then they're hiding everything.
|
Sam:
[1:32:22]
| Right. So with all of these factors together, you get Republicans who are just turn out as depressed. They're a little bit disillusioned. Also, like, even if they are gung ho on Trump, that doesn't always translate into whoever their local person is.
|
Ivan:
[1:32:41]
| Did you see that Nancy Mace is like, it sounded like she's going to quit as well, aside from MTG?
|
Sam:
[1:32:47]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:32:48]
| That's another bad sign for Republicans.
|
Sam:
[1:32:52]
| Well, and there are apparently a whole bunch of Republicans who are thinking about, at the very least, not running again and possibly quitting early. And I saw speculation that one of the issues here is that if you get one or two more quitting, the Democrats have a majority. So like you have to like they're going to carefully consider their timing because nobody's going to be want to be the one Republican that tips the balance so like the question is anybody who wants to get out has to do it quick because otherwise they might be locked in because they don't want to be that person well.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:33]
| You know or somebody you know we've unfortunately we've had this happen somebody gets sick or dies.
|
Sam:
[1:33:39]
| That could happen too because that happens So far in this term, it's only been Democrats who died.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:44]
| I know.
|
Sam:
[1:33:45]
| They had to be replaced. Fuck.
|
Ivan:
[1:33:47]
| Fuck. Jeez. Yeah. The damn luck.
|
Sam:
[1:33:53]
| But, you know, yes, you never know when when something could happen. But yeah. And look what what you're hearing from those Republicans. There are two factors in play. One is nobody really wants to be in the minority. So there are a lot of people thinking we're going to lose next time. I don't want to be here if we're in the minority because it's not fun. But then we've also got people saying, well, actually, it's not fun right now either, because we can't actually do anything. We can't actually do anything.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:25]
| Right.
|
Sam:
[1:34:26]
| We're not enacting any policies. We're not doing anything. All we do is grovel to Donald Trump and do whatever he says. And I'm not they're not having fun. And a lot of people don't like Johnson. I specifically heard some reports this week about how a bunch of the folks who are considering leaving are women. And one of the reasons is specifically because they feel like Johnson treats women like shit.
|
Ivan:
[1:34:53]
| Even in his own party. No, you don't say. Really? You're shocked? Oh, my goodness. You are shocked that your dear Republican leader is a misogynist. Wow! It took you this long to find out, you stupid idiots!
|
Sam:
[1:35:18]
| Yes. Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:21]
| How do you think they finally figured it out, Sam? Did you see that cringy interview where he was sitting with his wife, but literally was trying to sit as far away as possible from his wife?
|
Sam:
[1:35:36]
| I did not see that.
|
Ivan:
[1:35:37]
| There is a video clip that is hilarious where he is shown in some interview with his wife that their interaction is so fucked up. OK, all right. In terms of physical contact or whatever, I mean, he is literally, literally. Just seems to, they're trying to avoid her at all costs.
|
Sam:
[1:36:00]
| That's lovely. Well, and of course, we've got the rumors about J.D. Vance getting ready to dump Usha for Charlie Kirk's widow.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:12]
| I totally buy that. I mean, that's on brand for these guys. I mean, look, Newt Gingrich dumped his dying wife for somebody else, right?
|
Sam:
[1:36:24]
| Twice, I think.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:25]
| Yeah, right.
|
Sam:
[1:36:27]
| Once while his existing wife had cancer.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:30]
| But no, cancer was dying, right, yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:36:33]
| Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:36:33]
| So, hey, this is on brand.
|
Sam:
[1:36:37]
| Perfectly. Okay, so, yeah, we may see more Republicans leave. We may see that staunched by the fact that they just can't afford to lose any more people. But, yeah, as of now, we're down to two vacant seats. I'm just looking at the stats. As of December 4th, two days ago, which, by the way, apparently when a Republican was elected in a special election, there was no delay in swearing them in. But it's now 220 Republicans, 213 Democrats, two vacant seats at the moment.
|
Ivan:
[1:37:14]
| By the way, I just saw that there's an opinion piece on by the Washington Post editorial board where the headline was, relax, it's not a winning economic message. And this is about the economy and Mike Johnson specifically. Republicans have a holiday message for cash-strapped Americans. Chill out. Relax, in quotes, said Speaker Mike Johnson, advised on Thursday, assuring voters that we'll feel better. What's provisions from the big, beautiful bill kick in next year? We are exactly on the trajectory where we've always planned to be. Steady at the wheel, everybody. It's going to be fine. Sam, it's going to be fine.
|
Sam:
[1:37:56]
| It's going to be fine. Excellent. All right.
|
Ivan:
[1:37:59]
| Look, the big, beautiful bill provisions is only going to give people like me more money. OK, that's it.
|
Sam:
[1:38:08]
| And by and by people like me, you mean people who are fairly well off anyway.
|
Ivan:
[1:38:13]
| Exactly. Yes. Those are the only fucking people that are getting money. He's fucking everybody else. The people who wound up having to cut back the number over here said apparently that Americans right now, this year, consumers estimate they will spend an average of seven hundred and seventy eight dollars on holiday presents down from one thousand twelve. At this point last year, okay? I haven't started my Christmas shopping yet. I need to do that. Growing numbers are using buy now, pay later services, another indication people feel strapped for cash. That are released by ADP show. That was the unemployment drop. But this is the winning message that Speaker Mike Johnson is selling. Relax. Don't worry about it. Steady the course. What we did is great and it's only going to get better. Despite every indicator saying the opposite. Which is probably why these people are like, you know, they're like, he's driving us a cliff, so let's get off the clown car before it crashes off the cliff.
|
Sam:
[1:39:20]
| Well, and some of these Republicans, by the way, have also been quoted in the press saying that if there was another speaker election now, Johnson would not win it. He would not have the votes. however i have not heard that there's any stirrings going on to try to remove him.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:41]
| But the biggest problem was because they know that would be a disaster too like another disaster i mean exactly they're gonna go through like another how many rounds did it take for him to be speaker i mean we lost track i mean that was just well no that that was.
|
Sam:
[1:39:54]
| The first time.
|
Ivan:
[1:39:54]
| That was the first time no no the second time he got it when he got the job when he got the job that we settled on mike johnson okay it took bazillion rounds if if mike johnson said resigned right now there's nobody in line to take this check right so it's gonna be a shit show again again yes.
|
Sam:
[1:40:19]
| Okay, let's wrap this thing up.
|
Ivan:
[1:40:21]
| All right, let's wrap.
|
Sam:
[1:40:21]
| Can we wrap this up?
|
Ivan:
[1:40:22]
| We could wrap it up.
|
Sam:
[1:40:24]
| Curmudgeons-corner.com. Go there. Find all the stuff. All our old episodes, transcripts going back a couple years now, all the ways to contact us, a link to buy a mug. You guys wanted a link to buy a mug. Start buying damn mugs. You know? I i haven't seen the like the huge i i haven't seen the order of like 100 100 mugs at a time.
|
Ivan:
[1:40:52]
| That's what i expected we need to get we need to get like you know how there for it used to be a big thing in order to funnel cash to like say somebody at the house of representatives was that if they they came out with a book all of a sudden you know some guy I would buy 10,000 copies of the book. Okay.
|
Sam:
[1:41:12]
| Right. Yes.
|
Ivan:
[1:41:13]
| That was the easy way to funnel money. So look, if you want to funnel money to us and buy 10,000 mugs, we are open to, we are open to having money funneled towards us. Yes.
|
Sam:
[1:41:26]
| We can be bought. Yes. The, the, the new all MAGA all the time, curmudgeons corner. Yes. For the right price.
|
Ivan:
[1:41:35]
| Yeah. Yeah no i i don't i don't i think that if they you know they could give me like a i will say that if i do that negotiation i will take the money up front uh and i'm sure that after the first week they will try to get their money back which i'll say no and well.
|
Ivan:
[1:41:55]
| I'm not going to refund the caymans or someone exactly they're they're not getting their fucking money back and i'm not and they're not going to renew.
|
Sam:
[1:42:05]
| Hey, I got to do it to them.
|
Ivan:
[1:42:06]
| Hey, they're doing it to us. I got to do it to them. Give me a fucking break.
|
Sam:
[1:42:10]
| There you go. And of course, a link to our Patreon where you can give us money as well. At various levels there, we will mention you on the show. We will ring a bell. We will send you a postcard. We will send you one of those mugs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And at $2 a month or more, or if you just ask us, we will invite you to the Commudgeons Course Slack where Yvonne and I and a bunch of others are hanging out throughout the week, sharing links, chatting. I, you know, we, there are all kinds of conversations going on. We've been, Yvonne and Pete and some other folks were talking about cars for a while. They were talking about like, you know, what exactly is wealthy? What's not wealthy? All this kind of stuff. There are all kinds of topics going on. But what Yvonne is something that was discussed on the Curmudgeons Car Slack this week that we have not talked about on the show that you would like to highlight?
|
Ivan:
[1:43:03]
| Well, there were two things. One is Sam made a point of mentioning that I didn't share this picture of this drunk raccoon, apparently a raccoon broke into a uh a liquor store of some kind and broke the bottles and then licked the the the alcohol got drunk and was found passed out drunk by the bathroom like laid out like i have actually picked up drunk people laid out i thought you were gonna say you'd.
|
Sam:
[1:43:38]
| Actually picked up drunk raccoons.
|
Ivan:
[1:43:39]
| No no i've done that with i've done this with people Okay? More than once, okay, that they passed out at the bathroom like this. Not with a raccoon. Apparently, the Virginia Distillery Company, formal statement regarding the very intoxicated raccoon, they issued a statement. We'd like to address the reports of their very intoxicated raccoon found inside Virginia ABC store. According to eyewitnesses, the raccoon entered the premises, bypassed the allocated Berman, and went straight for our award-winning American single malt. We're proud of our whiskey. We did not expect it to be so quite appealing to local wildlife. Anyway, so they had that. So we had the drunk squirrel. Okay. The second thing.
|
Sam:
[1:44:18]
| Now, apparently, speaking of AI as well, this was a true incident. This was a true incident. However, people have been spreading around fake AI video of the raccoon drinking out of the bottles and stuff.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:33]
| Yeah.
|
Sam:
[1:44:33]
| And so.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:34]
| I at first thought that it was fake. So I didn't share it. I didn't realize it was real.
|
Sam:
[1:44:39]
| And here's one of the, this is what is going to make our media environment so complicated. This was a true story, but with fake video circulating about it.
|
Ivan:
[1:44:51]
| Look, I saw Progressive the other day actually do a commercial showing, like, animals driving, which they actually mentioned that it was AI-generated, and this was a TV commercial that they did, like, with a voice of flow, but with, like, AI-generated images. So this is, we're going to get a lot more of this. So anyway, the second story talking about AI, let's say I've shared. Okay. You can go on a real live date with an AI girlfriend at this New York City cafe. We wish we were kidding. Okay. I, what the fuck.
|
Sam:
[1:45:27]
| Man? So the picture they have, the picture they have showing there, by the way, you go to this restaurant. It's like, it ranges like a semi-fancy formal restaurant with like tablecloths and candles and all this crap. And then at the table, when you sit down, they prop up a phone on a holder that has your AI girlfriend to talk to during your date.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:49]
| I mean, you know, couldn't they at least get you an iPad?
|
Sam:
[1:45:53]
| It looked like a phone in the picture.
|
Ivan:
[1:45:55]
| Yeah, I know. But could they at least get you a fucking iPad? I mean, for real.
|
Sam:
[1:45:59]
| Think you know just they could they could do a full-size monitor even you know like apple vision like.
|
Ivan:
[1:46:07]
| The screen so you could think that you know you're like looking at them or something there you go that that's a good use for apple for.
|
Sam:
[1:46:15]
| The apple vision thing they could indeed but no this this looked like it looked like you had a phone where you were facetiming somebody but it's a fake person.
|
Ivan:
[1:46:23]
| Right. This is, I mean, I, I, I have to, I, I find myself not being drawn.
|
Sam:
[1:46:29]
| You know, when I FaceTime my fake AI girlfriend, I do it from home. I don't need to go to the restaurant.
|
Ivan:
[1:46:35]
| I find myself not drawn to having fake conversations with AI. I don't, I don't. You tried to do it on the show. It was kind of blah. I, I, I got, I upgraded my, my Google home assistant now to Gemini and it says that I can have conversations with it. I have not been interested in having a conversation with the fucking.
|
Sam:
[1:46:59]
| Yeah, I'll tell you, I, you know, I mentioned I'm paying at least three different AI companies, is one of which I'm really using. The other two I used earlier, but use less now. But I'm always using it to do specific things. I can't say I've ever once just like, you know, I'm going to talk to it. I'm going to have a conversation. I just haven't done that. Even when I use the voice mode, I'm asking it questions. Like I've done that where like I'm walking the dog, Alex and I, and my mom who sometimes walks a dog with us, we're talking about something like the other day I was walking. We were walking the dog, my mom, my son, and myself. We're walking the dog. We're going around. My mom makes a comment about like one of the trees we pass and how it had really big leaves. And she wondered something about it. So I pop open, you know, chat GPT. I take a picture of the tree. I ask it what's up with this tree. What's the name of the tree, whatever it tells me, It talks to me and we have, we have, I asked some follow-up questions. It was, it was the big leaf maple, by the way, my mom was remarking on how big the leaves were. And so we asked what it is. It turns out the name of the damn tree is the big leaf maple. And it was like, you couldn't be any more creative than that. It couldn't be like something else. No, it's the big leaf maple because it has big leaves anyway. way. So, but it was, it was purpose. Like, you know.
|
Sam:
[1:48:28]
| I'm using the AI to get some information. I'm using the AI to help program something I'm working on. I'm using the AI for something. I can't say I've ever once just been like, you know, I'm lonely right now. Let me just spend the next half hour talking to the AI.
|
Ivan:
[1:48:45]
| No, no, no. I just, I get nothing from that. I mean, I just, no, no. It's like the same problem that I have with watching like how, uh, these, uh, supposed to like scary movies where I know it's fake. And I just, they don't, I'm like, just looking at it. I'm like, this is just stupid. And that's it.
|
Sam:
[1:49:07]
| I don't know. Meanwhile, I get startled by things on shows I'm watching that aren't even supposed to be scary.
|
Ivan:
[1:49:14]
| Exactly. There you go.
|
Sam:
[1:49:15]
| I jump in. Not, not, not Godzilla. I just laughed at Godzilla.
|
Ivan:
[1:49:20]
| Two, two more things.
|
Sam:
[1:49:21]
| I want to do more things. Go, go.
|
Ivan:
[1:49:22]
| One was, I shared, I lost everything at a friend's recommendation. I invested my life savings in a firm abroad. Now it's all gone and the CEO was in court. What now? So, you know, investing everything into some obscure offshore investment, okay, and then being shocked at the fact that you lost all your money, okay, and, you know, it's a scam. You're a fucking idiot okay if you do that okay just put all your.
|
Sam:
[1:49:57]
| Money into the donald trump coin like.
|
Ivan:
[1:49:59]
| Exactly and normal people just lose 100 that way yes then the last one that i had it was the there was an article on bloomberg about the microsoft is the house that excel built and they talked about how excel started or whatever the interesting part about the story was that the guy who was the key developer at some point basically quit microsoft he was like i'm burnt out this sucks sometime in the 80s and he decided to go he said fuck this i quit i'm going to be working at a farm and picking vegetables and he did that for two to three months and then realized shit this sucks i'm gonna go back let me call and they actually wanted him back at microsoft Let me call them to see if they'll hire me back. And so he did. But the guy went in the middle of it and said, fuck this. I hate this shit. I'm going to go work on a farm and pick vegetables and then realize, what the fuck am I doing? This sucks.
|
Sam:
[1:51:02]
| Okay. You know, I can see some of, you know, as I'm trying to figure out what to do with my life. Like, okay, I could pick vegetables.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:11]
| Exactly.
|
Sam:
[1:51:13]
| Let's go do that for a while.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:14]
| If you look at this guy, he said that, yeah, after a little bit of doing that, he realized, holy shit, this sucks.
|
Sam:
[1:51:20]
| No, I honestly, there are some things that are complete career shifts that might be interesting to me. Picking vegetables is not one of them.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:28]
| Picking vegetables is not one of them.
|
Sam:
[1:51:29]
| Farm work in general is not something that appeals to me, I don't think.
|
Ivan:
[1:51:33]
| Yeah, no, he, you know, he went and he basically just went and he was like, he was like burnt out. He's pissed off. He quit. And yeah, he was, uh, he was, uh, he was picking vegetables for, for a bit, for, I can't remember exactly. It was farm work and it was hard. And he realized that, yeah, I, I, um, I, I don't, I don't, I don't like doing this. Let me see. I actually found it here specifically. He was so frustrated both by delay and he'd been excluded from the meetings in which the decision was made that he quit telling colleagues his plan was to leave the software industry in favor of migrant farm work. I look back on it. It's clear I was just totally burnt out. Project Odyssey got back on track after Clunder ran out of cash somewhere in the OJ Valley two months after his departure. I picked lettuce a couple of times and did some other odd jobs, he recalls. Then my backpack was stolen. I'm like, I need money. Let me call Microsoft. And they were desperate to have him back. And so they were like, fine, just get back here.
|
Sam:
[1:52:42]
| Beautiful. Okay. I think we're done.
|
Ivan:
[1:52:46]
| We're done.
|
Sam:
[1:52:48]
| Thank you, everybody, for joining us yet again. Have a great week. Blah, blah, blah. Next week, I will have that link for everybody to suggest things for us to predict on our annual prediction show. In the meantime, stay safe. Have a great week. We'll talk to you later. Goodbye.
|
Ivan:
[1:53:06]
| Bye.
|
Sam:
[1:53:36]
| Thank you. Thanks, Yvonne. Have a good weekend. We'll talk to you later.
|
Ivan:
[1:53:41]
| All right. Bye.
|
Sam:
[1:53:42]
| Later. Bye.
| |
|
